


I Want Your Midnights

by rookandpawn



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:15:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22065364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rookandpawn/pseuds/rookandpawn
Summary: He opens the door to find the last person he expects standing there.
Relationships: Scott Moir & Tessa Virtue, Scott Moir/Tessa Virtue
Comments: 23
Kudos: 180





	I Want Your Midnights

**Author's Note:**

> Happy New Year. Thank you so much to everyone who's supported this writing adventure of mine. Every hit and comment have meant so much to me.
> 
> Here's my gift back to you.

He opens the door to find the last person he expects standing there.

“Virtch! What are you doing here?” Paradoxically she’s also the first person he always expects to see there. Which pretty much sums up why his life is so very complicated.

“Your mom said you were wallowing, so I’ve come to cheer you up,” she announces as she pushes past him and makes her way into his apartment. She’s never been in this apartment before so he watches as she takes in her surroundings with a slightly disappointed look on her face.

“I just moved in.”

“But ask yourself if it would look any better if you’d been here for a year?” She flings her coat on a stack of boxes and then settles on the couch, placing two plastic bags on the coffee table.

“I’m not wallowing.” He ignores her question because she’s almost certainly right. “And if I was wallowing, I have every right to be. Divorce number two was finalized yesterday.”

“Suck it up. We’ve all been through it.” She offers him one of the beers she’s pulled from the bag.

“No thanks. I’m trying to avoid alcohol. Drunk Scott makes bad decisions.” 

She laughs at him, possibly with him. If anyone has had a front row seat to all of Drunk Scott’s decisions, it’s her.

“Like marrying wife number two?”

“No, that was all sober Scott, and I stand by that decision. But getting hammered and having a one night stand with Kaetlyn and getting her pregnant was all Drunk Scott.” He clinks her beer bottle with the Coke she gave him in exchange for the beer.

“You can’t possibly have thought it was going to work?” She lifts an eyebrow as she starts to unzip her booties. 

He watches her chuck them across the room, landing at the door with a thud. She giggles with delight as they skid to a stop. This silly childlike part of her is something she rarely lets people see and he’s glad to see that she still deems him worthy even after all these years.

“I didn’t think it would, I was just hoping it would last longer than it did. On account of us being friends at least.”

“You just didn’t count on her still being in love with Trennt.”

“She offered to stay, to try and make it work.” Kaet had been willing to do anything if it meant it was best for their daughter. She’s a better mom than he could have imagined. They probably could have made it work, there was nothing wrong with their marriage. There was nothing right about it either. “But who am I to stand in the way of true love?”

They raise a glass to that, and fall into a silence he’s only comfortable inhabiting with her.

“Wait!” he says, when his brain finally catches up. “Did you say we’ve all been there? Tess, no.”

She takes a long pull on her beer before answering with a shrug. “Mine was final on Dec 23rd, so Merry Christmas to me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why? It wasn’t your fault.”

“Wasn’t it?” 

She starts at his honesty. 

Apparently Sober Scott is intent on bring up topics long ignored. So he course corrects, as he always does, “What happened?”

“He was just so boring,” she giggles at her confession. “Appropriate and upstanding and great on paper, but so, so boring.”

He understands completely. No one, nothing is as interesting or fun as when they were together.

“Do you ever think we should have tried the whole couple thing?”

Fuck! He can’t believe he said that out loud. Sober Scott is an even bigger problem than Drunk one. At least he won’t be getting anyone pregnant.

She just stares at him with the whole deer in headlights thing, her bottle frozen half way to her lips.

“Because then we would have gotten it out of our systems and we wouldn’t be constantly comparing everyone and having them come up short?” 

“Do you compare every woman to me?” she asks very carefully.

“I...”

He might as well tell the truth. He really has nothing to lose. 

“I do.”

“Oh.”

Double fuck. He really should have kept his mouth shut. Why is he such an idiot? He hasn’t said anything for thirty-five years. Why the hell did he think now was a good idea?

“I do too,” she whispers and he almost doesn’t catch what she says he’s so busy trying to quiet his racing brain.

“Should we...?”

“Sober Tessa is not ready for that conversation,” she cuts him off.

He gets it. He wasn’t expecting the turn the evening’s taken, he doubts she came thinking it was going to go this way either.

He turns on the TV to cut the tension. It’s the beginning of New Years Rockin’ Eve and Ryan Seacrest is blathering on. Mindless enough that they can relax.

“So shall we make a plan?” she asks after her second beer. She’s not even remotely tipsy yet. One of Tessa Virtue’s great secrets is: she can drink him under the table.

“Plans?”

“It’s New Years Eve and we’re sitting here with nothing to do and no one to do it with,” she has that look in her eyes that he knows means trouble but also a lot of fun.

“I’ll have you know that I have raging kegger planned for later.”

“With your unpacked boxes?” 

“Me and Ryan Seacrest and the unpacked boxes.” She raises a single eyebrow at him. “Make me a better offer.”

“Piles of junk food, burgers and New Years Rockin’ Eve with yours truly.”

“Won’t Seacrest be jealous?”

“He’ll understand that I always come first,” she says with a cocky smile.

She does, which has always been the problem. Even when they retired and made the conscious decision to walk out of each other’s lives, when they didn’t see each other for months at a time. They always put the other first. 

“He’s very understanding,” he counters, more understanding that wife number one certainly.

“Let’s go to 7-11 and then we’ll make a real effort to have Tipsy Tessa come out to play, so we can actually have a talk.”

He eyes the mountain of candy and chips on his coffee table with trepidation. She seems to have bought one of everything from the store. Including chicken wings, jalapeño poppers and fries.

“It’s not going to bite you,” she says and takes a drink from her Coke and cream soda slurpee. 

“It’s harder to lose weight at forty-two than it was at twenty-two.”

“I can’t believe you’re past forty!” She finds the idea more amusing than she should and he wonders if she snuck some vodka into her slurpee while he was in the bathroom.

“You’re forty too!”

“But I have less wrinkles,” she shoots back.

“And I have less grey hair.” He cracks open a bag of Skittles. He might as well enjoy himself if they’re going to keep discussing their advanced age.

“But at least my hair isn’t thinning,” she whispers the unmentionable and ducks out of the way when he throws a handful of Skittles at her.

“It is not!” It is, just a little compared to the other guys his age, but he doesn’t want to admit it just yet.

“You’ll always be twenty to me,” she says and hugs him. He lets himself fall into the embrace for a moment. Inhale her sent, slightly different than before but still Tessa, still the most familiar thing in his sense memory, in his life.

He can’t remember the last time they hugged like this. Probably at her wedding, right before he decided to take Kaetlyn up to his room.

“If you eat all the Skittles, I’ll sack you,” she whispers sweetly in his ear. He laughs so hard he almost chokes.

“Where are the the kids?” she asks as she sits down across from him at the table. She rips open a bag of sour cream and vinegar chips and immediately shoves a handful into her mouth. 

He never found the quiet comfortableness that he shares with Tessa with either of his wives. He always felt like he had to be on his best behaviour around them. Like he was on a very long job interview.

“They’re with their moms and future step-dads if I’m reading the situations correctly.”

“You must miss them.” 

“I do but I got to spend Christmas Day with all three of them. Christmas morning was a blast.” He thinks it might be the last year that Michael believes, he was very interested in the logistics of how Santa delivered all those presents. And Kyle follows everything his older brother does without question, so he won’t be far behind. At least he’ll have Lily to keep the magic alive for many more years. At one she didn’t seem to even understand the concept of Santa, and was happy to play with the box Michael’s skateboard came in. “Kaet and Trent had dinner with us at my parent’s house.”

“How very civilized,” she agrees.

“She invited me to spend New Years with them too, but I don’t know...”

“Four’s a crowd?” she offers.

“Something like that.” 

He watches as she unwinds her hair from the elastic holding it in place, and shakes it out. She’s grown it longer again after several years of keeping it in a bob. She still looks so young with her hair tumbling around her shoulders and a mischievous look in her face. She reaches out and squeezes his hand before she begins the process of winding her hair back up again.

“What did you do for Christmas?”

“Well, my divorce was not nearly so civilized, so I hid at my mom’s place.” She takes a decisive bite out of a Mars bar. There’s a simmering anger in her eyes that he hasn’t seen in a long time.

“Why are you angry?” Years of therapy and years of just being them have made it easy to ask these kinds of questions.

“I did everything I was supposed to do. I met the right guy, from the right family who made the right amount of money, and he was nice and almost understood about you and I, and it still didn’t work.” She bangs the table and Skittles go flying in every direction. “Why didn’t it work?”

“I might not be the best authority on how to make a marriage work. Remember divorce number two?”

“You’re not supposed to feel alone when you’re with another person, are you?” She looks so heartbroken and sad. He wishes he could do something to take away her pain, worries that he might ultimately be the cause of it. 

“Did you love him?”

She doesn’t hesitate, “No.”

He didn’t think she did. He could tell at the wedding. Isn’t that why he’d gotten so drunk, trying to screw up his courage to say something? Why he took Kaet to his room when Tessa wouldn’t let him get her alone. 

They stare at each other for a minute. There’s so much he wants to say, is about to, when she cuts him off.

“Guess I better clean up those Skittles,” she says with a shrug, won’t quite meet his eyes.

It’s going to be a marathon of a night for Sober Scott.

They try to play chess. Find the box where the chess board is, which takes forever because he didn’t label any of the boxes. They laugh when they find his underwear in with his kitchen utensils. Lily helped him pack and he gets a little misty thinking about her toddling back and forth and putting his stuff into whatever box she stumbled across. He would have stayed with Kaet just so he could spend every moment with his beautiful, joyful daughter. She would have stayed with him too, they’d been companionably happy, but he couldn’t let her give up her chance at love.

They take their time setting up the board because neither can remember where the pieces go. Scott because he’s not sure he’s ever played despite being the owner of a chess board and Tess has now officially slipped into Tipsy Tessa and she can’t remember anything when she’s full on tipsy. For some reason, actually Drunk Tessa could have not only remember the rules but probably could have bested almost anyone she took on.

They abandon the game after three moves because they really wanted to play ping pong, and order burgers instead.

Tessa keeps tracking their driver on Skip the Dishes, gleefully calling out updates on the their driver Omar’s progress, as he unpacks his kitchen and contemplates how much of his old underwear he should keep since he just bought a new set.

When she starts singing a song of her own creation about Omar and their burgers, vaguely to the tune of Maneater, he decides to throw away everything and embrace the new.

“How come you’re not living at the house?” she asks from where she’s sitting on the kitchen counter, one hundred percent in his way.

“I decided to give the house to Lily. I’ll stay there when it’s my week and here when it’s not.” He’s managed to hang onto the house through almost everything and he’s not ready to give up on it yet.

“Where does Kaet go when it’s your week?”

“I assume to Trennt’s but I haven’t asked.” He's not sure he wants to know.

“So civilized,” she salutes him with her beer and spills some on her hand. 

He can’t take his eyes off her as she licks her hand and wrist clean. He feels a pull in his groin that’s inappropriate and oh-so-familiar.

“I need to put something in that drawer,” he gestures vaguely to the drawer she’s covering with her skin tight, jean covered legs.

“Go ahead.” She opens her legs slowly, almost obscenely. The look in her eyes tells him she knows exactly what she’s doing. She’s teased him like this before, when things between them have reached a boiling point. Carmen, after PYC, during TTYCT, but he’s always walked away. She’s been the level-headed one (when they were teens, after Sochi, during the comeback) when he’s done the same. 

But this time, he doesn’t want to walk away. Doesn’t want to resist temptation. So he moves over to her. Brushes her thighs with his knuckles as he opens the drawer. Refuses to look anywhere but her eyes as he methodically places each piece in the drawer. Delights in her gasp as runs his fingers down the inside of her thighs as he closes the drawer. He takes the space the drawer occupied. Presses his whole body against hers. 

It’s a contest to see who will crack first. They’ve played it before but this time no one is budging. His mouth is centimetres from hers and gets closer as he tucks a piece of hair, loose from her bun, behind her ear. She sighs as his fingers trace the outline of her ear, down her jaw line, stopping to thumb at the juncture of her neck. 

They’re breathing the same air now. She starts to lift her hands from where she’s held them stock still by her side, hopefully to put them on his body, anywhere on his body, when the phone rings.

She immediately stops, freezing her hands in place near his biceps. He wants to ignore the phone. He desperately, desperately wants to ignore it but he hasn’t been able to ignore a phone call since the moment Michael cried for the first time.

“I should get that,” he says at the exact moment she says “You should get that.”

He pulls away from her and finds the phone where he left it on the kitchen table. It lights up with a picture of his boys.

“Daddy!” Kyle yells when Scott answers. “Michael, it’s Daddy.”

“I know,” his oldest answers, but there’s a fondness in his exasperation that can only be found in an elder sibling’s voice.

“It’s almost midnight,” the five year old explains. It’s not. They’re agreed that the boys could do a count down three hours early and get to bed at a decent time. “Mommy said we should call you and do the count down together. Ready!”

He puts the phone on speaker, so Tess can hear too. She stays silent, a smile on her face, as the Moir boys count down from ten together. Kyle screams when they get to zero and runs away from the phone. He thinks he can hear Michael roll his eyes through the phone. 

“I love you, Dad,” he whispers. He admires the quiet tranquility that his oldest has achieved at such a young age. “I miss you.”

“Love you too, buddy. Are we still on for the Science Centre next week?” 

“All the way to Toronto?” 

“All the way, and just you and me.” Michael loves special trips just the two of them. Kyle is happy with anything. He once waxed poetic over a shoe lace.

“I’m so excited.”

They say their goodnights and I love you’s after they lure Kyle back to the phone, and he hangs up thrilled as always to talk to his boys but a little sad that they’re not there in person to hug and kiss. Tessa puts a reassuring hand on his shoulder and gives him a reassuring squeeze.

“Science Centre?” she asks, replacing her hand with her chin.

“He wants to be a quantum physicist. Or an astronaut.” He shakes his head. “He’s so smart, but we both know he didn’t get that from me.”

“You’re one of the smartest people I know.” When she says it he almost believes it. “Still no interest in skating?”

“None. Horrified by it in fact.” His whole family finds Michael’s distaste for cold and ice hysterical, but Scott’s relieved that he isn’t interested in following in his footsteps, would rather his son find his own identity.

“Maybe Kyle?” she laughs.

“He fell down standing up the other day.” He’s fallen over toys, chairs, his own feet and caution signs. They’re all terrified to let him anywhere near the ice. At least he’s good at falling, almost never crying, mostly unfazed by the various bumps and bruises he’s collected and up almost instantly and off to fall over the next thing.

“I guess Lily is your last hope,” she says just as his phone bings. Almost as if she’s heard her name, Kaet has sent a picture of their daughter. Asleep on the floor of her room, red cheeked and sweaty, her thumb in her mouth.

“You’re really a lucky guy,” she says when he shows her the picture. “And they are so lucky to have you as their dad.”

He pulls her into a hug, kisses the side of her forehead.

The buzzer sounds and she screams, “Omar is here!”

She disentangles herself from the hug, before dashing to the door, tripping over a box on her way.

They’ve barely moved since they inhaled their burgers, fries and milkshakes, attached to the couch, as they watch New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. They’re a mere fifteen minutes away from the countdown, when she turns to him.

“Should we kiss at midnight?”

“What?” the word comes out higher pitched than anything since he hit puberty.

“Should we kiss at midnight?” she enunciates each syllable, or at least as much enunciation as she’s capable, given she’s progressed to Drunk Tessa.

“Do you think that would be a good idea?”

“Why not?” she swings her feet off his lap, where he’s been massaging them after she threatened to stick her toes up his nose if he didn’t, and sits up. “We never have before. We should probably give it a try.”

He wants to tell her all the reasons why it’s a really bad idea. As he looks into her slightly unfocused eyes, eyes that have never once let him down, he also wants to list all the reasons why the should start making out immediately.

Instead he says, “We have, um, kissed.”

“We have not!” she punches him in the chest. “I would remember.”

“Except you don’t.”

He can tell she’s searching her mind for any possibility. The look of confusion combined with desperation she wears is almost comical. He’d laugh if he didn’t think she’d hit him again.

“When?”

“Do you remember that party in Canton?” he starts and she raises an eyebrow at him. He can’t blame her. They went to a lot of parties in Canton, both together and apart. “Right after you turned nineteen…”

“Oh and I was pissed because the drinking age was twenty-one in Detroit and oh…” she turns bright red as the memories flood across her face. “I got so hammered that night.”

She’d been a woman on a mission. Looking back, he knows that it was more about the pain in her legs and her fears that her career was over that drove her that night. As soon as he realized that she was out of control, he’d stopped drinking and kept an eye on her. He’d always taken his job as her protector seriously even when he was twenty-one year old shit head.

“Why did you stop me from kissing him?” she slurred at him as he pulled her into an empty bedroom. The first three rooms were occupied and he got an eyeful of some things he would have preferred not to. 

“Because you were too drunk to be kissing him.”

“I was not,” she says and proves his point by tripping over a pair of shoes, and ending up on her ass. She giggles so hard that she ends up toppling over. “I really liked him.”

“If you can tell me his name, I’ll let you go back to kissing him.”

“Dave?” she says from the floor, her face pressed to a carpet that he’s going to guess hasn’t seen a vacuum in years. If she was sober she’d be horrified.

“His name was not Dave.”

“Really?” she says and licks her lips, picking up some carpet lint in the process. He wants to hurl. “I could have sworn his name was Dave.”

He has no idea if his name was Dave, he’s never seen the guy before and was not introduced to him. He does know that Tessa has no business kissing him, and that Dave or whatever his name is, should know better than to kiss someone as drunk as Tessa.

He helps her sit up against the bed, mainly because he can not watch her lick the carpet for a third time.

“You take good care of me.” She falls onto his shoulder and when he pushes her upright, she falls the other way. After several attempts to right her, he gives up and lets her rest her head on his shoulder.

“It’s my job.”

“What’s your job?”

“Taking care of you.”

“And you do a really good job of it.” She tries to pat his cheek but ends up pawing at his nose instead. 

“You’re ridiculous when you’re drunk,” he says as he puts her hands in her lap.

“Oh, I am well past drunk and am now…” She leans right into his face as she talks and punctuates each word with a poke at his chest. “What’s the word? Hammered?”

“And your breath smells like a something died in your mouth.”

“But you love me anyways.”

“I do.” He does. Suspects that he always will.

“How come we’ve never kissed each other?” she asks with a sigh.

“It’s not a good idea.” It’s what everyone has told them their entire lives. Coaches, their families, other skaters.

“Shouldn’t we find out for ourselves?” she says slowly as if she's been thinking about it for a long time.

“Tess, I…” she swings her self up from where she’s sitting, suddenly much more nimble than she was only moments before, and lands in his lap. She’s facing him, flush against him. They’ve never been this close before when they weren’t on the ice. He isn’t sure he actually knows how to form words anymore, even though his mind is screaming at him that this is a really bad idea. 

She leans in, just as his mind stops misfiring, but by then other parts of his body have taken over. He meets her half way. It’s weird at first, because it’s Tess and he's know her forever, and they really shouldn’t be doing this, but then…

Then it’s good. So, so good. Better than any kiss he’s experienced in his entire life. 

“And then you threw up in my mouth.”

“I what???” she screams.

“You threw up in my mouth.”

“I did not!” She hides her face in her hands. The tips of her ears are pink. “Did I?”

“Well, you pulled away first, so it was more down my shirt than in my mouth.”

“Oh God. I’m so sorry,” she moans.

“No big deal. I’ve put you through just as bad, if not worse.” He was furious at the time, he forgave her pretty quickly. They’d been through so much since then, seen each other at their absolute best and their most pathetic and disgusting, that it hardly stands out anymore. It wouldn’t even be a memory anymore if not for those few delicious moments where her lips were on his.

“No wonder you never tried to kiss me again.” She finally takes her hands away from her face, but won’t quite look him in the eye. “Did you ever even think about it?”

He doesn’t answer because of course he thought about it. So many times, but he’s not sure telling her that would be a good idea.

“Cause I thought about it.” She moves closer to him, their thighs are touching, and it burns where they meet. “Do you want me to tell you all the times I thought about kissing you?”

“Tess,” he groans.

“Obviously first there was Umbrellas, but that was hardly my fault considering your lips were right there for a whole season,” she barrels ahead despite his warning tone. “And then again after Vancouver…”

“When we won?” he can’t help but be swept up the hypnotic tone of her voice. Unlike when they’ve taken the trip of this conversation before, he doesn’t want to stop, he wants to take the ride right along with her.

“Before. We’ve never been so in sync. I was in so much pain and the only thing that got me through was the way you believed in me, the way you took care of me.” She inches closer to him as she speaks.

“That was all you. You were so strong…” He’s having trouble forming words because all he can think about is her words and the way her thigh is pressed up against his. How his skin burns in every place they touch, even through the fabric that separates them.

She nods in agreement, but he can still tell she doesn't quite believe him. That she’s never been able to see herself as the warrior of a woman she is. 

“I didn’t want to kiss you during Carmen, but I did want to do everything else to you, with you. And I think you did too.”

He groans. He was consumed by her that season, haunted by how badly he wanted her day and night. 

“I didn’t feel that pull again until after Sochi, when we were both so sad and broken, and I just wanted to make everything better.”

He’s glad she didn’t then. He wouldn’t have been able to resist and any attempt at a relationship then would only have ended in heartbreak.

“I should have kissed you when we decided on the comeback,” his voice is wistful and full of missed opportunities. 

He remembers the moment, right there on the Great Wall. He’d been convinced she was going to, but something made her stop and even though he’d been disappointed he’d followed her lead, maybe he shouldn’t have.

“I always wondered what would have happened if I did. If we’d have gone into the comeback as a couple. Would we have made it or would it all have fallen apart?”

Would they still have won gold, if they were a couple? Would that thing that drove them to greatness have been diminished or enhanced? The question always hung over them, was one of the reasons that they never crossed the line.

“Were you going to kiss me in Pyeongchang?” Her question pulls him out of the thoughts he’s been mulling over his entire adult life.

He knows exactly what moment she’s referring to. That moment on the podium that he and the rest of the world have analyzed endlessly.

“I’m not sure what I was going to do. And then you pulled away.” That moment keeps him up at night. What was he going to do?

“I wanted you to, but I didn’t want our first kiss to be in front of all those people. I just wanted it to be for you and I. We already shared so much of ourselves the world, they didn’t deserve that too.”

And then it was too late. They’d been overwhelmed with well wishers, and speculation and real life.

“And then on tour and every time we skated to Shape of You,” she speeds ahead, almost as if she’s afraid that if she doesn’t get it out, she never will. “At Thank You Ilderton, when TTYCT ended. Walk of Fame when you went off script and said all of those..things.. those amazing things about me. That night we went to Stars on Ice. Later when RTR ended.” 

He takes her hand and squeezes it. He knew, knew she felt that way, but he’d already made a commitment and he needed to move on and so did she.

“And when you got married I shut it off. I really stopped thinking about it because I knew that we needed to be apart. And I didn’t think about it again until…”

She chokes on the words and stops. There are tears starting to form in her eyes and he wants desperately to take all the pain away, to tell her they don’t have to have say anything else, but he knows they have to. They’re going to be stuck forever if they don’t.

“Until?” he prompts, and kisses each of the knuckles on her hand.

“Until I was standing up there in that stupid church I never wanted to get married in, with all those people who I barely knew staring at me, and all I could think about was kissing you. How I wished it was you.”

“I had no idea…” or maybe he had. Maybe that’s why he’d run to Kaetlyn, even when he knew it was a terrible idea.

“And right now.” She swings herself, so she’s straddling his lap, facing him. It’s so reminiscent of the last time that they were in position that he’s back in that moment. “I really, really want to kiss you right now.”

“Is that…” he stops. He's made the same argument his whole life, but is it even his argument? Because what is stopping them now? Is there any reason not to finally have everything he’s ever wanted? “I’d really, really like that too.”

“I promise not to throw up on you.” 

And isn’t that why he loves her, why he always has because in the midst of life altering decisions she can always make him laugh.

So they kiss. And it’s the simplest thing they’ve ever done, even though they’ve turned it into the most complicated.

They’re tentative at first, nervous as they begin their exploration of the forbidden. They take a moment to find a rhythm to really understand what the other wants and needs, but it’s faster than he ever has before, and then it’s…

It’s magic. Better than any kiss he’s ever experienced in his life. 

They kiss and kiss. They’re still kissing when the clock ticks midnight.

“Happy New Year,” they say into each other’s mouths, unwilling to break contact. They laugh but they keep kissing.

They kiss until she pulls back to yawn, and he realizes how late it is.

“Sorry,” she mumbles, and moves to kiss him again.

“Wait.”

“Please tell me you’re not changing your mind.” The hurt and disappointment that flash across her face are too much to take. He kisses the tip of her nose, hoping to reassure her.

“I am so not changing my mind,” he says and she grins at him. “But I do think we should slow down.”

“If we’re going to slow down, you should probably take your hand off my boob.” She looks down at her sweater, where his hand is, in fact, under both her sweater and her bra. He reluctantly removes it and she moans as he drags his fingers along her nipple.

“I want to do this right.” He says trying to will himself under control as she removes her hands from where they were gently scratching his back. He’d probably be able to fully focus, if he removed her from his lap, but he can’t bring himself to move her. She feels so right exactly where she is. “I want to take you on a date, many dates, and I want us to do this for real.”

“Me too,” she agrees as a smile overtakes her entire face. “I should go before I’m too tired to drive.”

He stops the leg that she’s trying to move with his hand, keeping her firmly in place. “You could sleep here.”

“That’s not exactly going slow,” she says and nips at his bottom lip.

“Just sleeping. Get your mind out of the gutter, Virtch.”

“I’d like that,” she says through another yawn, confirming he’s making the right decision.

He stands up with her legs still wrapped around him and she whoops in excitement and surprise.

“Not bad for an old guy,” he says.

“Don’t drop me,” she giggles into his neck.

“I never have.”

“And you never will.” 

He puts her down when they reach the bedroom. There’s only a bed (brand new, he’s only slept in it four times) and a bunch of boxes. The linens are clean and soft and he can’t wait for them to smell like her. 

He hands her one of his shirts and turns his back while she changes. He’s seen her naked before, not much is left to the imagination when quick changes happen in small spaces, but he wants to do this right. And he doesn't want to see her naked until he can undress her himself. She slips into bed next to him and they immediately wrap their arms around each other.

“I’m so glad I came over tonight,” she whispers, her voice already tinged with sleep. It won’t be long until she’s out.

“Me too.” He kisses her forehead, her temple, the side of her mouth. Listens as her breathing starts to slow. “I don’t want to get married again, unless it’s going to be forever and I think you’re the only person I have a chance of that happening with.”

“Maybe you could take me out on a date first?” she giggles.

“Sounds like a plan,” he whispers back, but she’s already asleep.

He follows not long after. He’s finally exactly where he wants to be.

She’s not there when he wakes up. 

He was worried that she wouldn’t be. Every time they’d come close to this point, to finally telling the truth, she’d run.

“Fuck,” he says into the pillow beside him, it still smells like her. He shouldn’t have said that part about marriage. What the hell was he thinking? He gave her the perfect excuse to bolt.

He’s not going to let it happen this time. He's not going to let her run, he decides as he swings his legs over the side of the bed. There’s no way he’s letting her go.

He’s just pulling on his pants as he hears a clinking in the kitchen. Then a voice humming. He flies out of the bedroom, moving faster than he ever has in his life.

She’s not gone.

She’s standing in the kitchen, loading the sink with dishes, and humming her song about Omar.

“Did I wake you? I was cleaning up the bottles from last night.” She smiles at him.

“I thought you were gone.” He runs his hands through his hair and tries to decide if he's hallucinating her presence.

“I thought I’d stay awhile, if that’s okay with you?” Her voice is nervous, but her eyes are full of hope and promise.

“That’s more than okay,” he says and joins her at the sink. He washes the first dish and hands it to her. She takes it in exchange for a kiss. They wash in silence for awhile until he finally asks, “Do you ever think we had to go through that, so we could end up here?”

“Or maybe we're just idiots,” she answers and flicks some bubbles at him.

“Maybe we are.” 

But he looks forward to the years ahead where he gets to find out.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm @rookandpawn1 over on Twitter if you want to come by and say hi.


End file.
